Beach Landscape
Oil on academy board
8 1/4 x 12 inches
Circa 1925
As published in:
Scenic Impressions: Southern Interpretations from the Johnson Collection
Callaloo, 2018, volume 39, number 5
As exhibited in:
Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2019–2024, TJC Gallery, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2019; Richardson Family Art Museum, Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 2021; Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee, 2022, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, Florida, 2023, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland, 2024
A visionary leader in the development of African American art both academically and commercially, James Vernon Herring employed the curatorial process to define African American art at a time when the subject was neglected—or worse—dismissed altogether. Between 1943 and 1961, the Barnett-Aden Gallery, co-founded by Herring and his partner Alonzo J. Aden, offered a space for artists of color to exhibit their work in deeply segregated Washington, DC.
Born in Clio, South Carolina, James Herring was sent to Washington at the age of nine to pursue broader educational opportunities, which he found at Howard Academy, the university’s preparatory school. After earning his BA in pedagogy in art from the predominantly white Syracuse University in 1917, Herring began teaching drawing in the department of architecture at Howard University in 1921. He did so in the hope of creating a dedicated art department, a feat he accomplished within a year’s time. This success—as well as the 1928 establishment of the university’s art gallery—has been attributed to Herring’s charisma and dogged campaigning of Howard’s president. Known on campus as “The Professor,” Herring built a remarkable art faculty which, during his 1921−1952 tenure, included Elizabeth Catlett, Loïs Jones, and James Porter, among others. The roster of Howard students in the Herring era is equally stellar: David Driskell, Delilah Pierce, and Alma Thomas, to name just a few.
Herring’s painting style, which recalls the light effects and broken brushwork of the late nineteenth-century French Impressionists, attests to his belief that artists should be free of racial aesthetic boundaries. This view placed Herring in direct contrast to the ideals espoused in the New Negro Movement founded by his Howard University colleague Alain Locke. While Locke contended that African American artists should produce an exclusively African aesthetic, Herring encouraged a broader consideration of creative sources beyond, but inclusive of, African art.
Herring also sought to introduce the fine arts to black communities beyond metropolitan DC. Thanks to a Carnegie grant, Herring successfully developed the College Art Service in 1948. This program provided traveling art exhibitions to HBCUs in the South until at least 1967, an initiative that has been described as “a quiet revolutionary act” for its time.
Scenic Impressions: Southern Interpretations from the Johnson Collection, 2015–2018, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; McKissick Museum of Art at the University of South Carolina, Columbia; Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee; Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts at Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina
James V. Herring was a tremendous force for the education and promotion of African American artists beginning in the 1920s when the Harlem Renaissance was in its ascendancy. He spent the majority of his career at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In addition to his campus activities, in 1943 Herring co-founded the Barnett Aden Gallery. The first integrated exhibition space in the city, the gallery’s emphasis was on art for the home—small to moderate size pieces by both black and white artists.
Because of his numerous commitments, it is little wonder that Herring’s oeuvre is rather limited. Stylistically, he leaned toward an impressionistic approach characterized by thick impasto. Beach Landscape is a small painting on board, probably created as a plein air sketch. It is noteworthy that Herring preferred landscape subjects, eschewing representations that might easily be defined as “African American.”